Not really.

Laugh out loud funny, and mostly safe for work.

I think a couple of you (invisible_al and wulfboy in particular) might like to see the banner for a new RPG campaign I'll be running in about a month or so .... :-)

ETA: It's going to be Neverwhere meets Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels using the Unknown Armies system.

No player spaces left, I'm afraid.

Yes, I am an awful tease.

Ganked from Seth Godin's blog - a mashup for YouTube allowing you to see all the videos posted on a searchable subject, arranged on a timeline.

http://www.dipity.com/mashups/timetube

I know who Rose is.

I can think of several of you who will appreciate the artistry in the clip below.

We are each other's incomplete journeys.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2008/apr/24/bankcharges.banks

UK banks could be forced to return billions of pounds of overdraft fees to consumers after a high court judge said the fees could be challenged by the Office of Fair Trading.

Mr Justice Andrew Smith agreed with the OFT that charges were covered under the Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Regulation 1999.

So those of you still with outstanding claims against the banks may well find that you can move on those claims now.

When I posted (late-ish at night, outside of a couple of G&Ts) "Will I be here in a year - that largely depends on you" - it wasn't a 'please be more entertaining' - it was meant much more as a 'As long as you guys are around, I'll be staying :-)"

Apologies if it came over differently.

I renewed my LJ Paid account today.

Looking back, I've had a LiveJournal just over 6 years. I keep forgetting to mark the date, but my first LJ entry dates back to 8th April 2002 - before I moved to London, before I got this flat, before I met feistyredhead.

If I was really bored I'd count how many entries I've made over that time, find out what were my prolific months, see if it's actually worthwhile for me to keep going with a paid account. I feel like I'm posting to LJ less and less, yet it's still the website I check first in the morning, and most regularly (aside from my webmail) through the day.

LJ has shifted function for me over the years. It's a diary, and a way of keeping in touch, but it's also my RSS aggregator of choice now.

I've tried Facebook, I've tried MySpace - neither really fulfills the same function as LJ, even though fewer of my friends are posting here regularly.

But I still renewed my account.

Will I still be here in a year's time?

I think that largely depends on you.

There seems to be an increasing amount of debate this year about left wing nationalism / patriotism. Me, I'm all for it. I think that people gather into tribes naturally, to feel a sense of belonging. But those tribes don't have to be exclusionary or negative.

George Orwell wrote, in his 1945 essay, Notes on Nationalism (Link)

Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism. Both words are normally used in so vague a way that any definition is liable to be challenged, but one must draw a distinction between them, since two different and even opposing ideas are involved. By 'patriotism' I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, NOT for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality.

That's a philosophy of patriotism that I can happily wave a flag behind.

So Happy St. George's Day to all my English friends; I hope you have a good one!

Okay; it's on Sunday at 11am, but there's a series called 'My Music' which last week did a programme on Seth Lakeman, and this week on Kate Rusby - both fantastic English folk singers; Lakeman from Cornwall and Rusby from Barnsley.

Well worth a look if you're up at this time :-)

EDIT TO ADD: dreamfire - next week it's Eliza Carthy if you're around on Sunday morning .

http://www.tom-carden.co.uk/p5/tube_map_travel_times/applet/

This is a proof of concept, but based on real underlying data. Tom has written a java applet which redraws the tube map based on time rather than distance or connections (which is what the Harry Beck map does).

It's a work in progress, and Tom's got several things that he'd like to add to it. But like other map-sites I've linked to before, it's a thing of beauty because it turns the notion of what a map is on its head, much like Harry Beck did back in the 30's.

Enjoy playing with it.

Some of you may recall me posting a while ago about a lovely television programme called Young@Heart - a documentary about a choir of pensioners with an average age of 80, singing covers by the Clash, Radiohead and Coldplay.

I found out too late to warn people that it was on More4 last night. That's not really helpful anyway, because I know that at least one of the people who really wanted to see it doesn't have digital.

However, I've just gone to 4OD which is the Channel 4 watch again service, and there it is.

4OD is a bit of a pain, because it's Windows only, and you have to download specific software to watch the programmes (unlike the BBC's iPlayer, which you can access using Flash) but if you don't mind that, and you'd like to watch a beautiful and sentimental piece of TV, I highly recommend it.

http://www.channel4.com/4od/index.html

The Independent's "Watch It" blog just pointed to an excellent summary of the first three seasons which is available on YouTube:



It should go without saying, but clicking on the above link may expose you to spoilers.

Spoiler free post - some mild spoilers in the comments; caveat lector.

So, having just watched the last Torchwood and the first Dr. Who in close succession (thanks to the magic of iPlayer), and given how Torchwood S2 was so much of an improvement on the first series, I think I'm rapidly coming to prefer Torchwood.

Now if only they'd have the courage to dump Captain Jack. Or at the very least persuade John Barrowman to knock off the botox. Some possibility of emotional reaction from him would be nice.

.. that there are many worse places in the world to kill time than Oxford.

I've been at a conference at the University for the last couple of days. Universities being universities, I tried to save money - even though I can claim the money back, I don't want to be excessive. So that involved booking a cheap train.

£9 to get back to London - that's a very cheap fare. But the first train I could get with that fare was outside of commuter time, so my train isn't until 7pm. And the conference finished at 4.

But I'm sat in a nice pub (The Honeypot, which is about 5 minutes walk from the station) with one of my colleagues, who booked the same train as me for the same reasons. We have Hoegaaden which they serve with a slice of lemon (not had it like that before, but it's nice). They do food, and we're outside in the sunshine.

Given that I've had to kill 8 hours in Middlesborough on a wet January Sunday, things could be an awful lot worse.

I just did something I'm not sure I'm proud of.

Certainly it hasn't left me feeling very clean.

I hope you can see why I was tempted though.

I'm at a conference, in a hotel, in a city where frankly, no-one knows who I am. The hotel is on the cheap end of acceptable; I think they'd complain if I snuck someone in at 11pm, for example, but at 7 pm, they're less discerning. I'm single, I'm away from home, no harm, no foul, right?

And it's not often that the circumstances fall into place in such a way that means the decision is all too easy ...

I haven't done it for a long while. Lack of opportunity, different circumstances; it's not really felt appropriate for a long while. But here I was, somewhere else, and it all just seemed to make sense.

I was wrong though. It hasn't really helped. I don't feel any better. Maybe the position was wrong, maybe it was hotter or colder than I really wanted. I certainly don't feel very clean.

Dear reader, I still don't see the point of taking a bath.

I'm in a hotel. I've got no where to rush off to, no one to meet. I've got an iPod with sufficiently long earphone cord and a big tile shelf by the bath so that I'm not going to dunk it into the water. There's even a shelf full of books in the corridor so I can read in there without worrying about damaging my book.

And it didn't help.

10 minutes in, despite listening to one of my favourite albums and reading what promises to be quite a good book, I was thinking "surely I'd be more comfortable sitting on a chair or lying on the bed. Surely I could jump into the shower, get clean and then sit and relax with my music and a good book.

Sorry to disappoint, but baths just aren't for me.

114: It makes talking to yourself slightly more socially acceptable.

115: Unlike the television, the cat might respond when you talk to it.